Subjectivity of the arts

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I am always suspicious of lists like " Top 10 movies of 2000's , Top 100 Greatest songs of all time etc" where they try to pit artistic creations against each other. The only you thing you can say about a piece of art is what you felt with it. What anyone else feels about a piece of art is anyones guess. There could be some general principles that could act as good guidelines (method to the madness)  Use music that evokes a particular emotion as in the frame in a movie, coherence of plot, relatability of characters etc, but anything beyond that is beholder dependent.

I was faced with truth very starkly when I started suggesting songs that I was hyped about to my friends who I had the same tastes in music but boy was I wrong. It's very interesting to see the different metrics that different people use to evaluate music, some people associate with the lyrics, some people emphasize relatability, some people emphasize music, vocal gymnastics, innovativeness of production etc. 

I realized that I emphasize a lot on relatability of books, movies and music. Since I am from Kerala, I relate a lot and love mallu  artistic endeavors. This was very subconscious for me for a long time, I used to suggest  "Avial(The band)" to a lot of non-mallu rock fans in my undergrad, but the thing that actually made them interesting for me was mostly the mallu references in their songs and less of rock elements. Same went with "God of small things" by Arundhati roy, which won the booker prize in 1998. This could be one of the first book that I read with the story based in Kerala, which was very well written and in English,.It instantly felt like home for me, and the novel was such a natural read. After this, I took upon myself to spread the joy of reading this book to other people and became a huge ambassador for this book, much to my despair. Most people I gave the book to found the language archaic and a tough read and struggled through it. There are so many more but I just restrict myself to these two.

Writing this, I just consciously realized my need to read more Malayalam books and dire need to learn the language better! ( Fuck you Kendriya Vidyalaya for not teaching Malayalam!). 

TLDR: "Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder"
 Modern interpretation:  Don't be disappointed if somebody doesn't like your Spotify playlist and       don't hate anyone for liking "bhai" movies.

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